1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to holding and pouring tools, and more particularly, to containers configured to receive, hold, and pour contents, such as liquids.
2. Description of the Related Art
Transferring liquid from one container to another and dispensing liquid from a container are important to many applications.
For example, in cooking applications, recipes, such as food and beverage recipes, require a number of ingredients in different proportions. To communicate these proportions, recipes typically refer to a measuring standard, one of the most prominent being a unit cup or a fraction thereof. Frequently, recipes refer to required or recommended quantities of both liquid and solid ingredients based on the number or fraction of cups of the ingredients. Commonly used containers to hold and pour the ingredients include conventional measuring cups, which are generally cylindrically shaped and made from rigid material. Therefore, they are space-consuming and prone to spillage, resulting in waste and variations from preferred proportions of ingredients. Moreover, conventional measuring cups are typically made from a unitary body of material for ease of manufacturing.
In laboratory applications, beakers are used, which are typically made of glass or rigid plastics, and therefore suffer from the same drawbacks as the measuring cups discussed above. Spills in such applications can be especially detrimental because laboratory experiments commonly require exact amounts of chemicals, and some chemicals can be harmful when they come in contact with the user's skin or the environment.